“Only you English can afford to live here,” jokes the taxi driver.

I demur politely on behalf of the average Brit (the nascent McMansion, it turns out, belongs to a local), but his impression that the South African property market is in the sights of invading hordes brandishing bank balances bulging with sterling is not entirely wide of the mark.

He drops me at the office of Dr Andrew Golding, chief executive of estate agency Pam Golding Properties, who crunches the numbers. “We estimate we have the lion’s share of foreign buyers. We sell about 15,000 residential properties a year in South Africa, about 1,000 of them to foreigners, of which 40% are British. So that’s 400 a year.”

“It used to be only the highest net-worth individuals,” says Golding. “Now they’re buying in any price range — starting at about £80,000 for an investment apartment in the centre of Cape Town.” He is reassuring about recent alarmist press reports of a proposed moratorium on foreigners buying and selling property in South Africa. “For any emerging economy, to contemplate cutting off foreign direct investment is counterproductive. A committee made a recommendation but the government says it won’t accept it.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for buyers to worry about.

In the past five years, Golding reckons, South African property prices rose by an average of 20% a year, but now “the market is correcting and we estimate about 12% per annum”.

Stuart Law of Assetz International, a UK-based property investment company, is more downbeat. “Growth is likely to continue falling. Mortgage rates, already 8.5%, are rising, prompting concern over the stability of the market. Yields have fallen, so rental income will fail to make a profit for many investors.”

And Mike Bester, of South African property group Realty 1, says there is a slowdown in house prices and bold buyers should pitch in with offers lower than the asking price.

Golding advises: “Position remains paramount. Assess the position for the usual things: sea front and good views. And security: the general level of home security is probably higher here than elsewhere in the world. We have walls and fences, many electrified. Many foreigners have bought into complexes we call ‘access controlled’ where security is taken care of.”

There are sophisticated locks and entryphone systems, but no security guards at the apartment block in central Cape Town’s seaside suburb of Bantry Bay, on the slopes of Lion’s Head, overlooking the Atlantic, where Sarah Dees and Stephen Ullman bought their top-floor flat in October 2004. The international bankers, both in their thirties, with homes in southeast London and Kent, admit to being “cash rich, time poor”, so they engaged Rod Pringle, who runs the South African franchise of property-finders County Homesearch.

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“We wanted a lock-up-and-go place with holiday rental potential,” says Dees. Pringle selected a shortlist of 10 properties in Camps Bay, Clifton and Bantry Bay, and in October 2004 they paid £310,000 for the 260sq m four-bed, three-bath flat with roof terrace a block from the sea. It was “a bit of a mess” and they got an interior designer to turn it into a comfortable, if bland, living space.

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